What's new in Tender: Queues

One of the first big new features to hit Tender are Queues. We actually launched this feature a few weeks ago, but forgot to tell everyone about it! (silly us). Queues are a way to organize issues on the admin-side. They’re generic notification-enabled buckets that hold issues. It’s much easier to show than to tell, so we have some screenshots to walk you through it all.

1. Next to each queue (and next to standard state-based buckets) is a pin icon. Clicking that icon sticks a queue with you, as seen in…
2. After you stick a queue, you’ll get this yellow tab that follows you around everywhere on the site. It’s a great way to work through a queue without going back and forth to the admin.
3. You can name your queues whatever you like. They can be user-specific (the same as assigning an issue to someone), action-specific, or general buckets.
4. After you add an issue to a queue, it’ll be tagged in the listings. You can see at a glance which issues don’t have any queues.

Adding issues to queues

Adding issues to a queue is simple. From the admin pages you can drag issues to the queues in the sidebar to the left. Or, if you’re on a discussion page, you can add them there as the screenshot below shows.

1. Clicking the “+” next to each queue adds the discussion to the queue, clicking the “-” removes it from the queue, and clicking the pin sticks the queue with you.

Notice the queue we stuck previously carried through to the front-end. Clicking the yellow tab shows the list of issues in that bucket right on the screen.

Filtering Queues

When we were playing with queues internally, we found out that sometimes we like queues to show open issues but not resolved ones, while other times we just didn’t care what the state was. Enter filtering.

When you click on a queue in the sidebar, you get the screen shown above. The light blue bar above the issue lets you choose which issues show up in the queue. We still save any issues that are filtered out, but only the ones that match your preferences will show in the interface.

Email Notification

The last little bit of magic for queues is how email notification works. When you’re on the edit page of a queue (after clicking manage custom queues, then edit), you get to choose who is notified when an issue is thrown into a queue. Alternatively, you can set which queues you are notified on in your ‘My Profile’ page.

What do you think?

We hope you like queues. They’ve been working out great for us – working as a filtering mechanism from all the issues we get, so that each person on our team can see the issues they can help with easily.